Heartbeat

[JohnFFlanagan]

It would be very useful to be able to setup a heartbeat and have the command station stop all trains if it doesn't hear a native command from a connection within the allotted time. In the same sense, if the connection is broken the trains should stop.

Background. I control trains with a program written on an RP 2040. That in turn gets inputs from other RP 2040s. They are pico W's and pico 2 W's. They are nice processors but I, and others, have issues with the chip or OS (both CircuitPhython and Arduino) hanging now and then. The processors reset after about 5 seconds and the master checks for a heartbeat from the slaves in about 1 second, but trains just continue on if the master hangs for 5 seconds. It would be great if the command station stopped everything if it didn't hear from the controlling station within 2 seconds.

[habazut]

The plan is to do this in the future as it seems to be a good thing to have.

For throttles connected with WiThrottle where heartbeat exists already.

For Withrottle the idea is not only to have heartbeat as we have now but as well to be able to force the client to use heartbeat in certain applications (and stop the train if the withrottle client refuses to turn on heartbeat because in withrottle the client decides if heartbeat is on or off).

Then we have to think how to add this to the DCCEX protocol. In particular to the startup negotiation. We probably want to be able to require heartbeat from the server to the client and for the client to request that the server listens to heatbeat. For the heartbeat in the DCCEX protocol no code exists yet, only thoughts. So of course we like contributiuons in source code how to implement this.

Regards,
Harald.